So, the problem is that because we can’t fix everything, we shouldn’t bother?
Edited because it wasn’t necessary.
We should all change our Facebook pictures to something. Like a plastic straw with a line through it! Sweet, solved that one.
I’m with you, man. This thread is like the Land of a Million Logical Fallacies.
Never did I say that at all. All I am saying that I disagree with this particular strategy in reducing the plastic waste in the ocean. I still think it needs to be done, but in a better way.
Especially not Starbucks creating a lid that is even more plastic than the straws it is replacing.
Yeah, this seems to be a case of people solving a problem with a solution that is even worse.
Eh, replacing two pieces of flimsy plastic with one piece flimsy plastic still sounds like a step in the right direction to me. If nothing else, they’ll be easier to recycle.
Specifically, replacing completely unrecyclable plastic straws with lids which have a tiny bit more plastic but are recyclable.
Well, since most plastic straws are #5 plastic, which is 100% recyclable, I don’t know how this changes anything.
It’s mostly a facilities issue. The typical plastics recycling plant in the US has a conveyor system that filters out small debris from the system, and straws are small enough that they fall through.
I think I heard once that only three US recycling plants will handle straws and bottle caps, but I’m not sure how old that info is.
I didn’t know that part. That certainly doesn’t help things.
Why do we need to drink our coffee and latte with straws or lids like a baby? Because the drink is “to go” ? Why do we need a drink to go? Let’s relax and drink a slow coffee …
btw. here in Germany plastic bags are gone and replaced by paper bags in supermarkets and everywhere else. Also, reusable bags are used more often, to save money for the paper bags (10-20 euro cents)
Here in America we never stop working or rushing from one thing to the next.
On the topic of plastic bags vs. cotton tote bags?
The re-usable cotton bags actually have a huge environmental impact when compared to the single use plastic bags. While plastic bags definitely are worse for ocean pollution than paper or cotton bags, paper and cotton bags use up so much more resources than plastic bags.
The study that the Denmark government did was pretty illuminating. They didn’t get into the ecological impact of plastics, but focused more on the water, fertilizer, natural resources usage of the bags.
I mean, this is one thing that I think is hard to grasp about how cheap, resources wise, plastic is.
When you are talking about a cotton fiber bag, you have to put into effect the land used for the crops, the water used to feed them, the pesticides/herbicides used to protect them. The oil used by the tractors to harvest them, the energy to process the fibers, shipping the bags to the store etc.
One of the most insane differences was in ozone pollution. When compared to a single use plastic bag at end of life 1 (re-used as a trash bag and incenerate) an organic cotton bag would need to be re-used nearly 20,000 times to mitigate the additional environmental impact.
Not necessarily saying that we should be using plastic bags with abandon, but it is important to look at the big picture costs of our re-usable bags, would you really use a bag 20,000 times? Even with the less extreme examples, regular cotton bags would need to be used 200-300 times to mitigate their impact. That is a lot of trips to the grocery store, much more attainable, but still.
I wish we had the resources to fund studies like this in the U.S., but good on Denmark for putting in the research before making any environmental decisions.
I use my tote bags two, to three times a week, and each can has the capacity of 3 or 4 plastic bags. Since each is over 4 years old, and ond that borrowed from my mom is even older, I think I am doing pretty good.
That is good. I suspect a lot of people aren’t that diligent. Apparently durable plastic shopping bags are the best - environmental wise, since they can be recycled.
I know I have far too many cotton totes that I have bought and used a dozen or so times and then lost. Paper bags are pretty good environmentally. Best option is to bring your own heavy duty bags that can be used for more than just groceries.
And really stay away from organic cotton, if you want to minimize environmental impact.
This was one of the things we focused on in college environmental studies courses, is how important it is to look at these issues from a big picture perspective. It also gives you a sense of how seriously fucked we are if we ever want to make substantial changes. Entire supply chains and resource management needs to occur on a deep level in time with a culture of customer responsibility.
Yeah, petrochemical solids are really a spectacular set of materials, easy and cheap to create and with enough flexibility to use in almost any situation.
But they never go away. That’s great for multi-year uses, but a terrible property for single-use items.
Wood, if left to decay, will last a handful of years before reverting to dirt; steels will take two or three times as long to decay into (mostly) harmless oxides; but plastics just slowly break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. Effectively every piece of plastic that has ever been created is still around - either sitting in a landfill, recycled into a secondary object, or polluting the environment.
That was a very cool read. And bless the Danes for providing the thing in English.
The thing about the organic cotton was surprising: the “organic” cotton bag would need to be reused 20,000 times to equal the creation and destruction costs of the single-use plastic… while a “conventional” cotton bag would only need to be reused 7100 times. I gather that’s due to the increased acreage necessary to produce an “organic” product (the Europeans have a well-defined definition of “organic”, unlike the US where it’s pretty much whatever someone wants it to mean).
Around here we use the “composite” bags made of recycled materials. According to the study, they’d need to be reused 870 times. From my family’s usage, I’d imagine we’ve either hit that or will do so before the bags fall apart; we’ve had our current set for three or four years and we use most of them two or three times each week.
[As a note, the study also assumes that the single-use plastic bags are being reused once as a trash bag, so the numbers above should be halved if you - like most Americans - simply throw them out after you get back from the store. E.g., the composite reusable bags would only have to reused 435 times.]
Yeah, the study deal with the creation and destruction costs of the various options, which are absolutely part of the equation. But they did not talk about the relative costs of the bags being lost as litter, which is the main argument against the single-use bags. An organic cotton bag may indeed cost 20,000 time more resources to create than a single-use bag, but it’s tough to argue that 19,999 plastic bags clogging up a river are somehow better than a single cotton bag polluting that same waterway.
This is true. That Danish report only spoke of the environmental (water, ozone depletion, fossil fuels, CO2) impact, and not the impact that the bags would have as litter.
I suspect in Denmark they have a pretty robust recycling program, as well as inceneration of trash, to reduce the possibility of those bags getting into their streams and natural parks.
The US is a complete shitshow as to how each state and munincipality handle recycling and waste pickup, but the environmental impact should at least caution people to either safely recycle your bags or get a good recyclable material tote bag and re-use the heck out of it.
When I lived in Brooklyn a bright blue plastic bag ended up in a tree across from our house. It was there, almost unchanged, for several years. The tree was knocked down by a storm and removed. The bag was still in the branches.
That is the problem with plastic though, if it isn’t properly disposed/incenerated/recycled, it can get out in the environment forever.
I don’t know to what degree this is sincere, but honestly, I could see an argument that American culture is part of the problem, either because people culturally don’t want to sit down and drink a coffee like an adult, or because due to things like economic insecurity, lack of real wage growth, etc, people don’t feel they have enough free time to do so.